Many white people, when they wish to be especially considerate, are in doubt about the term most acceptable to Negroes. There are indeed puzzlingly subtle distinctions, to which colored people are more or less sensitive. The adjective colored and the generic designations Negroes, the Negro, and the Negro race are always in order, but a Negro man, a Negro woman, etc. are somewhat distasteful. Negress is considered unpardonable.185
7. FORBIDDEN WORDS
The American people, once the most prudish on earth, took to a certain defiant looseness of speech during the World War, and when Prohibition produced its antinomian reaction they went even further. Today words and phrases are encountered everywhere — on the screen, in the theatres, in the comic papers, in the newspapers, on the floor of Congress, and even at the domestic hearth — that were reserved for use in saloons and bagnios a generation ago. A good example is nerts, in its sense of denial or disparagement. When it came in, in 1925, its etymology must have been apparent to everyone old enough to vote, yet it seems to have met with no opposition from guardians of the national morals, and in a little while it rivalled wham and wow for popularity in the comic strips. My researches indicate that it was coined in Hollywood, that great fountain of American neologisms. There arose there, in the early 20’s, a fashion for using openly the ancient four-letter words that had maintained an underground life since the Restoration. It was piquant, for a while, to hear them from the lovely lips of movie beauties, but presently the grand dames of Hollywood society prohibited them as a shade too raw, and they were succeeded by euphemistic forms, made by changing the vowel of each to e and inserting r after it. Nuts was not one of these venerable words, but it had connotations that made it seem somewhat raw too, so it was changed to nerts, and in that form swept the country. At the same time the college boys and girls launched bushwah, hospice, horse’s caboose and a number of other such thinly disguised shockers, and there appeared a considerable amelioration of the old American antipathy to bull, bitch, cock, stallion, and so on. Even pregnant returned to good society.
Victoria was not crowned in England until 1838, but a Victorian movement against naughty words had been in full blast in this country since the beginning of the century. In 1830 or thereabout, as Mrs. Frances Trollope tells us, “a young German gentleman of perfectly good manners … offended one of the principal families … by having pronounced the word corset before the ladies of it.”186 James Flint, in his “Letters from America,”187 reported that rooster had been substituted for cock (the latter having acquired an indelicate anatomical significance) by 1821; indeed there is a quotation in Thornton’s “American Glossary” which indicates that it may have come in by 1809. At the same time haystack began to supplant haycock, and roach to supplant cockroach, and a bit later a young man in Judge T. C. Haliburton’s “Sam Slick” was telling a maiden that her brother had become a rooster-swain in the Navy. Bartlett, in his Glossary, says that this excessive delicacy was not most marked among the survivors of the New England Puritans, but in the West. He goes on (c. 1847):
The essentially English word bull is refined beyond the mountains, and perhaps elsewhere, into cow-creature, male-cow, and even gentleman-cow. A friend who resided many years in the West has told me of an incident where a gray-headed man of sixty doffed his hat reverently and apologized to a clergyman for having used inadvertently in his hearing the plain Saxon term. Male-sheep, male-hog, etc. are of a piece with the preceding, to which we may add rooster, he-biddy, game-chicken, etc.188
When Captain Frederick Marryat, the author of “Mr. Midshipman Easy,” came to the United States in 1837, he got into trouble like Mrs. Trollope’s German. Gazing upon the wonders of Niagara Falls with a young woman acquaintance, he was distressed to see her slip and bark her shin. As she limped home he asked, “Did you hurt your leg much?” She turned from him “evidently much shocked or much offended,” but presently recovered her composure and told him gently that a leg was never mentioned before ladies: the proper word was limb.189 Even chickens ceased to have legs, and another British traveler, W. F. Goodmane, was “not a little confused on being requested by a lady, at a public dinner-table, to furnish her with the first and second joint”190 In the same way pantaloons became nether-garments or inexpressibles, stockings yielded to hose, antmire was substituted for pismire, breast became bosom, lady took the place of the too frankly sexual wife, bull became not only cow-creature (more commonly, cow-critter) but also seed-ox and Jonathan, shirt was forbidden, to go to bed became to retire, servant girls ceased to be seduced and began to be betrayed, and stomach, then under the ban in England, was transformed, by some unfathomable magic, into a euphemism for the whole region from the nipples to the pelvic arch. The 30’s and 40’s saw the Golden Age of euphemism. Bitch, ram, boar, stallion, buck and sow virtually disappeared from the written language, and even mare was looked upon as rather racy. The biblical ass, because the prevailing American pronunciation made it identical with arse, was displaced by jackass, jack or donkey, and to castrate became to change, to arrange or to alter, even on the farm. Chair was abandoned for seat, which presently began to be used for backside too, and so became obscene itself. To use the word shirt in the presence of a woman was “an open insult.”191 The very word woman became a term of reproach, comparable to the German mensch, and the uncouth female took its place.192 But even female, after a while, acquired a bad name, and when Vassar was established in 1861, under the name of Vassar Female College, the redoubtable Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, protested loudly, and female was expunged.193 Any hint of sex, in those delicate days, was forbidden. Even the word decent, if applied to a woman was indecent.194 The Americans, according to Mrs. Trollope, rejected Shakespeare as obscene, and one of them said to her: “If we must have the abomination of stage plays, let them at least be marked by the refinement of the age in which we live.”195 When she mentioned Pope’s” The Rape of the Lock “he muttered” The very title!” In 1833 Noah Webster actually undertook to bowdlerize the Bible. His version substituted breast for teat, in embryo for in the belly, peculiar members for stones (Leviticus xxi, 20), smell for stink, to nurse or to nourish for to give suck, lewdness for fornication, lewd woman or prostitute for whore, to go astray for to go a-whoring, and impurities, idolatries and carnal connection for whoredom. He got rid of womb by various circumlocutions, and expunged many verses altogether, as beyond the reach of effective bowdlerization.196 This mania for the chaste afflicted even the terminology of the arts and sciences. For example, the name of the device in which the percussion-cap of a muzzle-loading gun was fixed and exploded was changed from nipple to cone. It so appeared in “The Prairie Traveler,” by Randolph B. Macy (1859)— greatly to the indignation of Sir Richard Burton, who brought out an English edition of the book in 1863. “The American cone,” he explained in a footnote, “is the English nipple. Beg pardon for the indelicacy! Our cousins, as we term them, so far from calling a spade a spade, explain a cock by rooster, a cockchafer by chafer, and a cockroach by roach.”197
After the Civil War there was a recurrence of delicacy, and many euphemisms that still adorn the American newspapers came into use, e.g., interesting (or delicate) condition, criminal operation, house of ill (or questionable) repute, disorderly house, sporting house, statutory offense, fallen woman, felonious attack, serious charge and criminal assault. Syphilis became transformed into blood-poison, specific blood-poison and secret disease, and it and gonorrhea into social diseases. Various French terms, enceinte and accouchement among them, were imported to conceal the fact that careless wives occasionally became pregnant and had lyings-in. Richard Grant White, between 1867 and 1870, launched several attacks upon these ludicrous gossamers of speech, and particularly upon enceinte, limb and female, but only female succumbed. The passage of the Com-stock Postal Act, in 1873, greatly stimulated the search for euphemisms. Once that amazing law was upon the statute-book and Com-stock himself was given the inquisitorial powers of a post-office inspec
tor, it became positively dangerous to print certain ancient and essentially decent English words. To this day the effects of that old reign of terror are still visible. We yet use toilet, retiring-room, washroom and public comfort station in place of franker terms,198 and such idiotic terms as red-light district, statutory offense and criminal operation are daily encountered. Now and then a really amusing curiosity turns up. I am informed by a correspondent that in 1933 the pious Los Angeles Times printed sow-bosom in lieu of sow-belly. In 1931 the Chattanooga police, on arresting a man for picking up a streetwalker on the street, announced that he was charged with “walking the streets accompanied by a woman,” and it was so reported in the local papers.199 In 1925 or thereabout the Atlantic Monthly gave a cruel blow to the moribund Puritan Kultur by printing the word whore (as I recall it, in an article by Stuart Pratt Sherman), but when, in 1934, a play called “Within the Gates” was presented in New York, with one of its characters appearing simply as “The Young Whore” three of the local papers changed the designation, and another avoided it by omitting the cast. The Sun changed it to “The Young Prostitute,” the World-Telegram to “The Young Harlot,” and the American to “A Young Girl Who Has Gone Astray.” It should be added that the Times, Post and Telegraph printed it boldly, and that the Herald-Tribune, which omitted the cast, gave the word in the third paragraph of its review.200 Back in 1916 even virgin was a forbidden word, at least in Philadelphia. On February 26 of that year a one-act play of mine, “The Artist,” was presented at the Little Theatre there, and the same day the Public Ledger printed specimens of the dialogue. One of the characters was called “A Virgin,” but the Ledger preferred “A Young Girl.”201 In September, 1933, at the time of the Brain Trust’s unfortunate effort to reduce the hog population of the Middle West, the Iowa Farmers’ Union met at Des Moines and passed a resolution condemning “the scheme to raise livestock prices by slaughtering pigs and enceinte sows.”202 Hollywood, always under heavy pressure from official and volunteer censors, has its own Index Expurgatorius, augmented from time to time. It includes, as permanent fixtures, broad (for woman), chippy, cocotte, courtesan, eunuch, fairy (in the sense of homosexual), floozy, harlot, hot mamma, huzzy, madam (in the sense of brothel-keeper), nance, pansy, slut, trollop, tart and wench, and, of course, whore. Sex is also forbidden, as is the adjective sexual. Jew may be used only in complimentary connotations, and kike, yid, dago and nigger are prohibited altogether. God must be used circumspectly, and Gawd is under the ban. So are Lord (“when used profanely”), Christ, guts, hell, hellcat, Jesus, Geez, son-of-a- —, S.O.B.,203 louse and punk. Traveling salesman may not be used “where reference is made to a farmer’s daughter,” and liar is reserved for scenes “in a light comedy vein.” Even the word virtuous is to be avoided, as is bum.204 The radio is almost as prudish as Hollywood. Late in 1934 its syndics actually forbade the verb to do in songs, feeling that it was “a bit too suggestive.”205
Ever since the beginning of the Sex Hygiene movement, c. 1910, syphilis and gonorrhea have been struggling for recognition, but they work their way into the newspapers only slowly. At intervals vigorous protests against this prudery come from medical men. In 1918 the Army Medical Corps complained that the newspapers emasculated its bulletins regarding venereal disease in the Army by using euphemisms. One of the newspaper trade journals thereupon sought the opinions of editors upon the subject, and all of them save one declared against the use of the two words. One editor put the blame upon the Postoffice. Another reported that “at a recent conference of the Scripps Northwest League editors” it was decided that “the use of such terms as gonorrhea, syphilis, and even venereal diseases would not add to the tone of the papers, and that the term vice diseases can be readily substituted.”206 On April 29, 1919 the New York Tribune printed an article quoting with approbation a declaration by Major W. A. Wilson, of the Division of Venereal Control in the Merchant Marine, that “the only way to carry on the campaign [i.e., against venereal disease] is to look the evil squarely in the face and fight it openly,” and yet the word venereal was carefully avoided throughout the article, save in the place where Major Wilson’s office was mentioned. Whereupon a medical journal made the following comment:
The words “the only way to carry on the campaign is to look the evil squarely in the face and fight it openly” are true, but how has the Tribune met the situation? Its subhead speaks of preventable disease; in the first paragraph social diseases are mentioned; elsewhere it alludes to certain dangerous diseases, communicable diseases and diseases, but nowhere in the entire article does it come out with the plain and precise designation of syphilis and gonorrhea as venereal diseases.207
In 1933 the newspapers were full of articles about improvements in the use of malaria for treating tertiary syphilis, but few if any of them mentioned the name of the disease. According to the Nation,208 the New York Times spoke of it “only as ’ a dread form of insanity ’ caused by ’ a blood disease.’ ” The radio shares this prudery, and in 1934 it was belabored for it by Dr. Thomas Parran, Jr., health commissioner of New York State, who resigned from the public health committee of the National Advisory Council on Radio in Education as an earnest of his dudgeon. In the manuscript of an address that he had planned to deliver from Station CBS on November 19 the word syphilis was stricken out by the station Comstocks.209 When the rejuvenation quackery began to engage the newspapers, in 1924 or thereabout, they found it necessary to invent a new set of euphemisms. So far as I have been able to discover, not one of them ever printed the word testicles. A few ventured upon gonads, but the majority preferred glands or interstitial glands, with sex glands as an occasional variation.210 Even among medical men there is a faction which hesitates to violate the national canons of delicacy. Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, tells me that not a few of them, in communications to their colleagues, still state the fact that a patient has syphilis by saying that he has a specific stomach or a specific ulcer, and that the Journal once received a paper discussing the question, “Can a positive woman have a negative baby?” — i.e., can a woman with a positive Wassermann, indicating syphilis, have a baby free from the disease? In all matters relating to the human body, of course, euphemisms are common and some of them are very old. The tendency to conceal the disagreeable under Latin names, which began with Chaucer’s use of hernia for rupture, shows itself in our own time in the invention of such terms as halitosis. Sometimes French is used instead, as in the following advertisement in the New York Times:
“What can I wear that will make me flat enough for the new suits?” This question is most frequently asked by women who have large derrières. And we have a very specific answer for their problem. It takes a panelled corset with clever fashioning at the hips and waist to do the trick. To flatten the rear without making you look broad.211
But outside the fields of anatomy, physiology and pathology, in which concepts of the disgusting may reinforce concepts of the indecent, the prudery once so universal in the United States has been abating since the World War. In speech, if not in writing, words and phrases are used freely that were formerly under a strict ban, even in bordelloes. I have given some examples in the first part of this section. Even the unutterable four-letter words, as I have shown, have begun to edge back in thin disguises. A learned and extremely interesting discussion of the most infamous of them, with sidelights on the others, by Allen Walker Read, of the staff of the “Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles,” was published in American Speech in 1934.212 To find the hyper-delicacy of the Grant Era in full flower one must resort to the remoter and more backward parts of the country — for example, the Ozark region. Mr. Vance Randolph reports that among the Ozarkians, bull, boar, buck, ram, jack and stallion are still taboo, and that even such harmless compounds as bullfrog and buckshot are regarded askance. So are all words involving cock, e.g., cock-eyed, cock-sure and even the proper names, Cox and Hitchcock. A cock, to the hillmen, is eith
er a rooster or a crower. A stallion is a stable-horse, a bastard is a woodscolt, and a bull is a cow-brute. Certain everyday words are avoided whenever possible, e.g., stone, maiden, virgin, piece, bed, decent, bag, leg, stocking, tail, breast: for one reason or another they suggest blushful ideas. “Even love,” says Mr. Randolph, “is considered more or less indecent, and the mountain people never use the term in its ordinary sense, but nearly always with some degrading or jocular connotation. If a hillman does admit that he loved a woman he means only that he caressed and embraced her — and he usually says that he loved her up.” But
a woman who would be highly insulted if the word bull was used in her presence will employ Gawd-a-mighty and Jesus Christ freely as expletives; these words are not regarded as profane, and are used by the most staunch Christians in the backwoods districts. Women of the very best families give tittie to their babies in public, even in church, without the slightest embarrassment. Such inelegant terms as spit and belch are used freely by the hill women, and I have heard the wife of a prominent man tell her daughter to git a rag an’ snot thet young-un, meaning to wipe the child’s nose.… This same woman never uses leg and breast in the presence of strange men.213
Elsewhere in the Bible Belt the old taboos seem to be breaking down. In 1934 Dr. J. M. Steadman, Jr., of Emory University, Atlanta, Ga., undertook a study of the degree of prudery surviving among the students there incarcerated, most of them Georgians and probably a majority Methodists or Baptists. Altogether, 166 males and 195 females were examined, or 361 in all. Two of them proved their evangelical upbringing by listing the word obscene as itself “coarse or obscene,” and five added rotten, but the remarkable thing about the inquiry was the high degree of tolerance that it revealed. Thus, of the 361, only 24 banned whore as coarse or obscene, though two others thought it “of a sinister or unpleasant suggestion.” Some of the other votes were: against ass, 10; against bull, 5; against knocked-up, 2; against pimp, 2; against garter, 2; against harlot, 3; against teat or tit, 2. Rather curiously, the merely vulgar words got the highest adverse votes, e.g., belch, 25; sweat, 33; puke, 51; guts, 59; stink, 69; belly, 87. Unfortunately, Dr. Steadman allowed his subjects to make up their own lists, and so the more delicate of them omitted the worst words altogether; moreover, he himself expunged a few words in his report. Nevertheless, it shows a considerable advance in antinomianism in the heart of the Gospel country. “The fear of using words of an indecent meaning or suggestion,” he says, “is opposed, in different degrees for different students, by another powerful factor in the student’s language consciousness, the fear of appearing affected or sissy by avoiding the blunt, direct word for even repulsive acts or ideas.”214 The inclusion of euphemisms in some of the lists was of considerable significance. Thus, nerts got six adverse votes, halitosis got five, to pet got two, to neck got eight, and hussy got fourteen. To burp and to lay do not seem to have been included; maybe they had not yet reached Georgia. Euphemisms, says Dr. Leonard Bloomfield in “Language,”215 “may in time become too closely associated with the meaning, and in turn become taboo. Our word whore, cognate with the Latin carus (dear), must have been at one time a polite substitute for some word now lost.”
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